"We like executing writers. It sends a good signal," says Tupolski, one of two policemen interrogating a suspect in a featureless cell in a faceless totalitarian regime. The man with a grim past and an even grimmer-looking future is a writer called Katurian, whose violent Shockheaded-Peter-style fairy tales are full of small, innocent and irritating children who meet appalling deaths. According to Tupolski and his sidekick, Ariel, someone is using Katurian's unpublished stories as a model for a series of gruesome copycat murders.
Anyone who has followed the career of Martin McDonagh will know that the author has been accused of overkill when it comes to violence on stage. However, The Pillowman is less about whether violent imagery leads to violent acts, or even the power of literature and the threat it poses to such a state, and more about the making of the creative mind itself. This makes it both more and less interesting.
In a series of Hammer-horror peepshows, we see how Katurian's parents set out to turn their youngest son into a writer of genius by subjecting him to the night-time screams of his older brother, whom they tortured so that Katurian would have at first hand the material to be a great writer. When the young Katurian discovers what has been happening, he kills his parents and rescues his brain-damaged brother. Yet as his subsequent actions show, he values his stories more than the truth or even his own life.
It is an intriguing subject for debate made rather less intriguing in performance, despite some very fine acting. The play has moments of grim levity, but it lacks McDonagh's trademark wild black humour. In the end, it seems a bit like a vanity project about Why Writers Are Very Important People by a Very Important Writer called Martin McDonagh.
· At Theatre Royal, Bath, from tomorrow until Saturday. Box office: 01225 448844. Then touring.
